Linked List: June 2005

Thursday, 30 June 2005

Kathy Sierra on the “Featuritis Curve”. It’s a nice visualization of Einstein’s oft-quoted maxim: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In Sierra’s Featuritis Curve, the right side of the curve is not as simple as possible; the left side is too simple. This is related to some of the points I tried to make in yesterday’s fireball — I think Apple has the entire iPod lineup positioned near the peak of the Featuritis Curve.

Saturation coverage from Macworld on the new Adobe Creative Suite 2 — reviews of each of the apps and interviews with people at Adobe. This is exactly the sort of journalism that Macworld does better than any other Mac publication. (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat Professional all get 4.5 mice; GoLive on the other hand, gets just 2 mice, which is the equivalent of a sack of dog turds.)

Sven-S. Porst is pretty harsh in his review of iTunes 4.9. I disagree with several of his assessments (I’m not offended by the podcast source list icon, for example), but he makes many good points (e.g. why can you disable the Radio and Party Shuffle source list icons, but not Podcasts?).

Wednesday, 29 June 2005

He still sees reasons to continue improving the podcasting support in NetNewsWire, and I think he’s right. For example, some feeds only include podcast enclosures occasionally, not in every entry — feeds like that are better dealt with in a general-purpose aggregator.

‘My Web 2.0’ is Yahoo’s new Del.icio.us-style shared bookmark app. (What a terrible name, though; the “2.0” isn’t the version number, it’s part of the name itself.) Andy Baio has been beta-testing and has a nice overview, including a few links to other reviews.

Warning: links to a PDF, and a horribly typeset one at that. Seriously, a plain text file would be easier to read and look better than this. (Via 2lmc Spool.)
See also: Edd Dumbill’s quick review of their extensions.

New command-line (!) tool from Apple (inexplicably, it’s hosted at Mac.com — what’s up with that?). From the readme:

You can use Chapter Tool to create Enhanced Podcasts that work with iTunes 4.9 or later. Enhanced podcasts are podcasts that contain chapters. Chapters can be modified to display pictures or web links that can be displayed within the iTunes song artwork pane.

It only works on MPEG4 AAC audio files (i.e. it doesn’t work with MP3s), but that’s not surprising, since as far as I know, the MP3 file format doesn’t support anything like this. So it’s a nice usability gain for podcasts — chapters ought to be considered mandatory for anything longer than 10 or 15 minutes, and the web links and images are nice extras — but this is also a way to start establishing AAC as a superior format for podcast publishing. Which — and here’s the point where you can imagine Apple executives sinisterly twisting their mustaches — would help permanently cement iPods, as opposed to generic “MP3 players”, as the best way to listen to podcasts.

Monday, 27 June 2005

I’m a developer on Apple’s AppKit team; I work to make Cocoa better.
With a few exceptions, we are responsible for both AppKit and
Foundation. This is my blog.

Ridiculous Fish is simply outstanding (and uses a very clever, albeit markup-heavy, implementation of rounded rectangles in the layout). It’s only a few weeks old, so you can easily catch up and read the whole thing to date.

Saturday, 25 June 2005

Slides from his talk to the students attending WWDC this year. Despite the seemingly glaring “market share” numbers in Windows favor, there is definitely a business case for being a Mac-only developer — it depends on what type of software you want to write.

Wednesday, 22 June 2005

Thomas Fuchs’s very nice demo of Javascript-powered web app UI effects, built on top of the Prototype library. (Side-note: I’m sick of typing these ‘del.icio.us’-style domain names; they’re easy to say out loud, but a pain in the ass to type, and the novelty has long worn off.)

Tuesday, 21 June 2005

MacInTouch reader survey shows a surprisingly high failure rate for first-generation iMac G5s, especially 20-inch models. Seems to be under control in the current models, however. (Warning: not a permanent link.)

Mark Simonson on why an italicized typeface should be more than just a slanted variation of the roman letterforms. (In a postscript, he mentions that he expects to release his new font Proxima Nova by the end of June.)

Monday, 20 June 2005

$20 a month gets you the “payment-processing capabilities of a merchant account and gateway”. Sounds like a fantastic deal; I’m going to look into using this for Daring Fireball t-shirt and membership sales.

Saturday, 11 June 2005

Several executives close to the last-minute dealings between Apple
and I.B.M. said that Mr. Jobs waited until the last moment — 3 p.m.
on Friday, June 4 — to inform Big Blue. Those executives said that
I.B.M. had learned about Apple’s negotiations with Intel from news
reports and that Apple had not returned phone calls in recent weeks.

[…]

In the end, Mr. Jobs was given no choice but to move his business
to Intel, when I.B.M. executives said that without additional Apple
investment they were unwilling to pursue the faster and lower-power
chips he badly needs for his laptop business.

In other words, it’s not that IBM couldn’t keep up, it’s that they
wanted Apple to pay for the development costs for the new generations
of chips.

Friday, 10 June 2005

Jamie Zawinski has been waiting for stuff to “just work” on Linux for a long time, and he’s finally given up:

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.

Thursday, 9 June 2005

New open source Movable Type plug-in from Six Apart turns the Keywords field into a del.icio.us-style tagging feature. Too bad it replaces the Keywords field, which I’m already using for the slug names for post URLs.

This post from September 2002 pretty much makes Dan Benjamin look like a genius — he completely nailed Apple’s x86 transition strategy three years ago. (Of course, if he really were a genius, you wouldn’t have to go through the Internet Archive to read his old essays.)

Tuesday, 7 June 2005

Big news from Dave Hyatt: Apple has launched http://webkit.opendarwin.org, with live CVS access to WebCore, JavaScriptCore, and Web Kit. They’re accepting patches and contributions, and the bug database is public. WebCore and JavaScriptCore have always been open source, but not Web Kit, and the new open development model is major change.

(This new site consistently uses “WebKit” (as does Hyatt); Apple’s official developer documentation prefers “Web Kit”. I’d love to see this clarified.)

Upcoming product from Karelia; it’s an “iApp” style web site creation app. Impossible to tell from this teaser whether it’s actually interesting or not. If it weren’t for the fact that Watson was pretty cool, I never would have linked to this.

In a risky move that could further shrink its minuscule slice of the PC market, Apple Computer Inc. announced plans Monday to switch its Macintosh computers to the same Intel Corp. chips used in systems that run Microsoft Windows.

These are the same sort of dweebs who’ve been saying for 10 years that Apple “had to switch” to Intel.

At its Worldwide Developer Conference today, Apple announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh® computers using Intel microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007. Apple previewed a version of its critically acclaimed operating system, Mac OS X Tiger, running on an Intel-based Mac to the over 3,800 developers attending CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote address. Apple also announced the availability of a Developer Transition Kit, consisting of an Intel-based Mac development system along with preview versions of Apple’s software, which will allow developers to prepare versions of their applications which will run on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs.

Saturday, 4 June 2005

Useful information for web server log analysis. (Notice that Apple still can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s “Web Kit” or “WebKit” — they use it as two words in the body text, but close it up in the headline. Daring Fireball house style uses the two-word form, because that’s what Apple uses more frequently.)

Friday, 3 June 2005

They’re reporting it as a done deal, to be announced Monday at WWDC.
Assuming this is true, it’s HOLY SHIT news. I’m still skeptical —
the article doesn’t offer a decent explanation for why Apple would do
this.

Apple Computer plans to announce Monday that it’s scrapping its
partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel’s
microprocessors, CNET News.com has learned.

Apple has used IBM’s PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin
a phased transition to Intel’s chips, sources familiar with the
situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the
Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as
the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.

No word on who the sources are, and no explanation why higher-end
models wouldn’t switch until 2007.

Public beta of Jesper Lindholm’s fork of Brent Simmons’s open-source Huevos, which hasn’t been revised in a few years. It’s a small window from which you can fire off Internet searches; you can configure it to send a query to pretty much any search engine. Bonus points for the clever name.

Wednesday, 1 June 2005

WordPress’s entire publishing architecture seems geared around the assumption that posts will be authored in raw X/HTML, but so while you can get alternative text filters like Markdown or Textile to work (thanks to the numerous plug-in hooks), you’re pretty much swimming upstream.

Don’t miss the charts — they really show that Michel has worked his ass off to get PHP-Markdown working well in WordPress. This is one area where Movable Type clearly has the advantage — it’s really rather simple to hook up a text filter plug-in like Markdown.

Excellent Quartz Composer demos from Futurismo Zugakousaku. I wonder why Quartz Composer is only installed as part of the developer tools? This is something any visually creative artist could really get into. (From Daniel Bogan via AIM.)